Artist, film maker and now game designer off late, you probably know of Emir Cerimovic for none of that. Rather you might recall of him sentimentalizing his ordeal through The Seige of Sarajevo for The Survivor special of This War of Mine, to which he’d also contributed to as artist/consultant.

His fascination with the human condition of war then is no surprise, seemingly prominent in his paintings of charcoal, animations, documentaries and for the past eight years at least, in his vision of Almost Alive.

For that’s how long he claims to have been tinkering – single-handedly learning code and animations – to put together the post-apocalyptic shooter’s core mechanics. I’m no fan of the presentation, I’ll admit, but both the game’s Introduction and Gameplay Demo trailers are very telling of its real-time tactical combat system.

Mass propaganda was attacked by Information Technology, to subdue which a parasitic strain was released. This didn’t work out too well, a nuclear holocaust was considered the best remedy, leaving a remnant of mercenaries and mutants.

As one such soldier you’re called to the fray in 2.5D; switching between fast-paced combat and more cautious cover-based approach, you’re allowed to forge your character of play with over 100 skills and traits akin to perception, wisdom, dialogue and more importantly, insanity.

Almost Alive’s psychological aspect of warfare plays into your character’s insanity metric, with multiple traits of madness influencing/influenced by its narrative progression. These might result in the unpredictable – shooting allies, starting fights, to even killing themselves.

With an equally massive count of weapons, armor, throwables, drugs and destructible environments, the game encourages one to pick their style of play – by either manipulating, sneaking past, conversing, trapping, robbing, barricading or just plain old shooting through its populace – in favor of much replayability.

Its status is apparently what you see in either of the trailers, in addition to three fully completed script options, while only contributors to Cerimovic’s are Patreon provided access to builds and the entire development process.